Storage has become a commodity component in any computing environment and storage arrays are pushed down the stack of value offered to data centers. Intelligent storage arrays have large caches as well as high computing power that can be used in an intelligent way to add value. Today, the computing power of the storage arrays and cache are used for low intelligent tasks such as caching I/Os for speed before flushing them to disk, protecting data, RAID computations, pre-fetching I/Os for increased read performance, thin provisioning, replication and mirroring. These do not use any machine learning or artificial intelligence. In fact they are mainly control and management of the I/O subsystem. All the higher intelligent tasks are left to applications outside the array.
Application users require suitable performance for access to the storage system and do not care of the storage type. Users are not necessarily aware of the energy consumption or cost of the storage service. Therefore, users need ease of use of the storage without having to know storage configuration or price tag and provisioning. They need to be sure the data they use is protected and do not care what protection technology is used. Users need the data to be stored in secure storage and take no notice about how the data is encrypted and managed. Users only need to see a cloud storage that satisfies all the above criteria without worrying about how these goals are achieved. IT needs to supply the right amount of storage such that applications are not disturbed by shortage. In addition, IT must fulfill this correct storage requirement to deliver the best performance at lowest possible cost. IT deploys tiered storage to achieve the SLAs committed to the business at expense of human resources. IT must ensure full data protection and disaster recovery crucial to the business at expense of complexity. Finally, they must ensure maximum data security and safety specific to each part of the business and application.
As businesses try to address the cost/performance storage as well as energy savings, they are turning to tiered storage and disks that have been powered off, leaving IT to manage the complexity and ensure SLAs to users. Storage arrays use tiered storage to achieve the SLAs committed to the business at the expense of IT resources. There is a need to ensure full data protection and disaster recovery that is crucial to the business. Users need a storage system that is able to accommodate any type of application workloads transparently. Users require a storage system that will deliver optimal performance to all the applications concurrently maximizing the value of all the storage resources. A storage system is needed that will send feedback to IT with recommendations for additional resources required to fulfill all the SLAs of all applications and automatically rebalance storage resources based on changes in application mix. Vendors also need this storage system to utilize optimally new resources added to it. The highly artificial intelligent storage system is able to meet all these aforementioned needs.